Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan like to say they met at a networking event in early 2017—a bad one. “We rolled our eyes at each other,” says Kaplan, of the stiff sit-down dinner at a Manhattan restaurant. Two years later, the pair officially founded what they consider an alternative: Chief, an exclusive, $5,800-per-year and up networking club for female executives, now worth more than $1 billion. “I always joke that if a bad networking event can bring together two co-founders to build something new, just imagine what could happen if you really build an intentional one,” says Childers, Chief’s CEO.
If Chief is any guide, what such a network can do—first and foremost—is explode in size. By October 2022, it had hit 20,000 members, adding them at a pace of roughly 900 per month. The club now has a much-vaunted waiting list of 60,000 women who are eager to add Chief’s mission statement to their LinkedIn bios: “to drive more women to the top—and keep them there.”
